O the Joys of Childhood

I wasn't into the typical "girl toys" when I was little. I didn't have Barbies, dolls, or fake babies. I did have a lot of stuffed animals though. There are three things that come to mind when I think of childhood favorites: books, Powerpuff Girls, and forts.

My sisters and I read a lot of books when we were little. I remember every summer we participated in the summer reading program at the local library. We had to read a certain number of a certain level of books a week. We always surpassed the required amount and eventually started reading at higher levels than our age group required. I loved summer reading. It is always a time for pleasure reading in my mind. Sitting on the couch or by the pool enjoying a good mystery novel or fantasy book. It's one of the things I look forward to the most. One of our favorite things to do was record ourselves reading. We would sit in our playroom, often under a table with a blanket hanging over it for privacy, and read allowed as our cassette player recorded the story. What's funny, though, is we hardly ever listened to the recordings. Mostly we just did the recording and that was it. The few times we did play them back we always laughed at how funny we sounded. I still think I sound weird when I hear a recording of my voice.

Powerpuff Girls was our other obsession. We watched every single episode multiple times and recorded as many as we could (on videotape since this was before DVD). When we discovered we could pause the show a new obsession began. Many afternoons were spent in front of the TV drawing a scene from the show that was paused on the screen. We became experts at drawing Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. We paused the tapes so much that eventually a white static line started developing on the screen whenever a tape was paused. Our parents made us stop. But that didn't stop our creativity. One week we decided to make masks out of cardboard. Sarah took Blossom because she is the oldest and the bossiest. I took Blossom because my favorite color was green and I always viewed myself as kind of a tomboy. Clare took Bubbles because she was the youngest and most innocent. We spent a couple days cutting out the masks and coloring them. My mom still has pictures of all three of us lined up in our costumes. It was the first TV show I ever kept up with.

I think every kid goes through a stage where they love making forts. This stage lasted a couple years for my sisters and I. Forts probably isn't the right word though. We liked to make "rooms" out of cardboard boxes. Usually we could only fit one or two of us in them at a time, but for us it was a secret hiding place where we could escape to. I remember one particular box we made that was especially extravagant. We were well experienced with cardboard boxes at this point and realized we could make bigger forts if we connected boxes. Our final masterpiece had three sections, one for each of us. it was just wide enough for us to sit in but a foot taller than our sitting height. Each of us built a shelf above our head to store various items like flashlights and books. There was a small opening to crawl through to get in. We kept that fort for weeks. Eventually it started falling apart from us crawling in and out of it so much. It was our proudest accomplishment and I have many happy memories of it.